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Words with More-Than-Friends

Never again will I question my sixth sense about men and their advances.

On some level I always knew that I could sense attraction from a guy, from a mile off. I put it down to many things: paranoia [chiefly, and thanks to a legion of male friends], over sensitivity, bad experiences, hyper awareness, and more recently, unconscious facial reading. None of these explain what happened yesterday.

A month or so ago, a friend challenged me to a game of Words with Friends. I rarely have an opponent for word games that I actually know, so I never downloaded these Scrabble-type of games. Most of my friends are afraid I will beat them, and their egos won’t stand up to the onslaught. Which is a pity, because it shows how little they really understand me. Anyway, I downloaded the game, and we played. It was fun!

But of course, he lost interest after a while, and I spent hours cajoling the only other friend I saw on the game to play with me. After much muttering and dire prognostications, he agreed. But he takes EVER SO LONG to make a move. 12 days long, is what I am saying. So of course I got bored, and started looking for random opponents.

In the intervening months, I have played with dozens of people: male, female, Indian, non-Indian, etc. The whole gamut. Not once has any one of them messaged me. We played the game till its end, and that was that. I am wary of online opponents, because my experience is that gamers can get nasty when they are losing.

So, I am not a stranger to playing with other strangers, is my point here. So when I received a new request to play with someone, and my mind sprang to the assumption that he was going to hit on me, I laughed myself out of the room.

There was no precedent. There was no indication. All he can see is my picture, which is what all my random opponents can see. So of course I shushed my immediate reaction, and accepted the game.

The first three moves, there was no message. I felt stupid for the assumption, and not a little ashamed at my vanity/arrogance or whatever other devil prompted that assumption. And then, this:

Sigh.

My takeaway from all of this? I won’t second guess my instincts again. But I sure as hell won’t share them with any of my friends either.